“My Mañana Comes”: Real busboys of the Upper East Side

Irwin, an emerging New York playwright who’s making her Bay Area debut with “Mañana,” has a good eye for people and jobs that usually get overlooked and a keen ear for dialogue that crackles with the distinctive characteristics of common speech — including the differences between workplace and street speech, not to mention the degrees of learning English as a second language.

Two of the busboys we meet are native-born New Yorkers and two are undocumented immigrants; one is African American and three are Mexican or of Mexican descent; two are married and two are single.

[...] all of those factors feed naturally into a story as rooted in its Upper East Side Manhattan French restaurant workplace as the sinks and stainless-steel prep surfaces of Sean Fanning’s well-detailed back-of-the-house set.

Shaun Patrick Tubbs’ delightfully sharp and observant Peter is the captain of the crew, teasing and bucking up his teammates and keeping a watchful eye for anything that needs doing at anyone’s station.

A natural storyteller and mimic — and Tubbs’ imitations of everyone from haughty patrons to a child are terrific — he’s the key source of information on the details of the job, and why a well-run busboy operation is essential to a restaurant’s success.

Whalid (the hip, lanky Caleb Cabrera), the youngest member of the crew, is so well assimilated a second-generation Mexican American that he thought he was Puerto Rican until he was a teenager.

Money is tight for all four, and Irwin carefully builds in that reality to make the crux of her story an abrupt, significant cutback in their earnings and its dramatic impact on their relationships.

[...] in this tight and compact a telling, the clarity with which things play out makes the drama feel more like an object lesson — an effect that could be minimized in the kind of narrative possible in a film medium.